‘It’s not your fault you got cancer,’ said Cooper.
‘It feels like it. It looks as though I did it to avoid having to put things right for my family, to avoid paying back what I owe them. And I owe them a lot.’
Wharton gazed out of the window again. A pair of gold-finches were fluttering around a bird feeder hung just outside his room.
‘You know — the night they closed up the pub, I couldn’t face being there,’ he said. ‘Not right
‘I understand.’
‘Do you? It was more than a pub to me, you know. It was my life, and my home.’
Cooper nodded. He thought he did understand, but if Mr Wharton preferred to think it was a unique feeling, it might be best to let him talk.
‘So I sat in my car,’ said Wharton. ‘I parked up by the side of the road on Oxlow Moor, where I could see the pub in the distance, on the skyline. Do you know the spot I mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘I sat there for a long time, waiting for something to happen. And in the end, I saw the lights going out. It was dusk by then. I was sitting in my car, and I watched the windows of my pub going dark one by one, until … well, until the Light House ceased to exist.’
‘It must have been very painful,’ said Cooper.
Wharton smiled weakly. ‘I thought so at the time. But the fact is, I didn’t really know anything about pain until now.’
Wharton hardly ever met Cooper’s eye during his visit. Occasionally he would glance quickly around the room, as if checking it was still there. But mostly, all he wanted to do was stare out of the window — not looking at the garden or the fish pond, but at something much further away, beyond the range of ordinary, physical vision.
To Cooper’s mind, it looked like a long stare into the past. Wharton was a man drawn against his will to gaze at a vision of unhappy memories, a distant kaleidoscope of sadness and regrets. He hoped he would never see such a vision himself when he gazed out of the window in his old age.
‘There was no way we could keep going,’ said Wharton. ‘But I didn’t want to give up. I tried everything. In the end, I was so desperate that I trusted people I shouldn’t have done. I signed an agreement. They were supposed to put capital into the business for a share of the pub. But they turned out to be liars and parasites. There was a bit of decorating, some old furniture got chucked out and some new stuff moved in. They called it a redesign.’
Cooper nodded. The nostalgic chic. He shouldn’t have been surprised that it wasn’t Maurice Wharton’s idea of the perfect decor.
‘And then when it didn’t work out the way they’d told me it would, they pulled the plug. Just like that. They wanted their money back. Well, we’d already remortgaged, so the only thing we could do was sell up. I should have known, I should have been able to spot a wrong ‘un a mile off after all these years. But I didn’t.’
‘Perhaps …’ suggested Cooper hesitantly. ‘Perhaps your judgement wasn’t at its best.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve heard that when things went wrong, you began to drink too much.’
‘I was bitter. I was angry. Yes, of course I turned to drink.’
‘Alcohol never took away anger and bitterness.’
‘No. But it numbs them for a while.’ He turned away to the window. ‘For some of us, that’s the best we can hope for.’
He said it with such feeling that Cooper looked at him in surprise, studying him as if he was seeing him for the first time. Yes, there was more than a hint of bitterness in the eyes, a twitch of anger in the set of his jaw. A man who knew about alcohol, too. Not a good combination.
Wharton was silent for a while, lying back on his pillow as if he’d exhausted himself with the burst of emotion. Cooper sat quietly, waiting. He was reminded of the time he’d sat at his mother’s bedside at Edendale General Hospital. He’d eventually fallen asleep in the chair, and had woken to find that she had died.
Now, he began to wonder whether Wharton was aware that his visitor was still there in the room.
‘I was in the Job, you know,’ said Wharton finally, addressing some spot near the ceiling.
‘Were you?’ Cooper had heard the capital J and knew what it meant. ‘You served as a police officer?’
‘You didn’t know that, did you?’ said Wharton. ‘That’s the trouble these days — too much information, all that data and intelligence flooding in. There’s so much of it that it doesn’t get through to the right people. Not the bits of information you need to know, anyway. Someone will have that fact on a computer back in your office. I suppose you’ll ask them about it now.’
‘Of course I will.’
‘You know what they used to call me, don’t you? Mad Maurice.’
Cooper nodded. Some people still called him that. He doubted whether Wharton would want to hear it, though.
‘Well, that was me,’ said Wharton. ‘Mad Maurice. Not this pathetic thing that I am now. I’d like them to remember me as Mad Maurice, the terror of the Light House. Will you tell them that?’
‘I’ll be happy to, sir.’